The Seven-Year Saga of One Undocumented Student in Georgia

Seven years after avoiding deportation for a traffic violation, Jessica Colotl has had her DACA status revoked and is at risk once again.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BOB ANDRES / THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION / AP

In 2013, after a legal battle that had already stretched on for three years, Jessica Colotl, a twenty-six-year-old paralegal who was born in Mexico and raised in Georgia, thought that her immigration troubles were finally over. In 2010, she had been arrested for a traffic violation on the campus of Kennesaw State University, in Georgia, where she was a junior. She then spent thirty-eight days in an immigration-detention center, in Alabama, and was supposed to be deported, until a national outcry over her case led Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reconsider, and she was allowed to return home. Within days, however, she was rearrested, this time by the local sheriff, who claimed that she had given a false home address when she’d been booked into the county jail after her arrest. (The address corresponded to an old family residence listed on the insurance registration for the car Colotl was driving.) After several more months of legal wrangling, prosecutors offered her a plea deal, which she accepted out of desperation: community service in exchange for dropped charges. In 2012, she received protection against deportation from a federal program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and, in 2013, the charges against her were officially dismissed.

The outcome was a huge relief, but her life never completely went back to normal. Colotl had become infamous in Georgia. To anti-immigrant state lawmakers, she was the face of a problem that they insisted was out of control. In 2008, the legislature had passed a law forcing undocumented students to pay out-of-state tuition at public colleges. Colotl, who began college before the law was passed, wasn’t paying the out-of-state rate at the time of her arrest, and state Republicans tried to make an example out of her. They called on the Georgia Board of Regents, which oversees the public-university system, to root out undocumented students, who made up less than one per cent of the over-all student population. They also threatened to pass bills banning undocumented students from attending public universities. Their argument—that the undocumented were depleting state resources—was false. Undocumented residents in Georgia pay hundreds of millions of dollars in state taxes each year. Still, the Board of Regents bowed to the pressure and issued a policy banning undocumented students from the state’s top public universities. One member of the board told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that failing to act would have been “bad politics.” But the new policy devastated undocumented students in Georgia, many of whom had to give up on going to college altogether. In last week’s issue of the magazine, I wrote about a group of students who created their own underground school so that they could educate themselves.

This month, Colotl is back in the news. The Department of Homeland Security has stripped her of her DACA status, and ICE has announced that she is a priority for deportation. Why? The government is pointing to her 2010 traffic stop, saying, once again, that she lied to the arresting officers about her home address. The plea agreement she signed, in 2011, to try to put the legal saga behind her is now being cited by authorities as an admission of guilt.

“I never thought that would come up again,” Colotl told me a few days ago, when we spoke by phone. She described the latest chapter in what has become an endless ordeal. In 2014, she petitioned the government to allow her to travel to Mexico to visit her mother, who had moved back there and was ill. (DACA recipients must apply for special dispensation, known as “advance parole,” in order to exit and reënter the country.) A federal agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, granted her permission for the trip, but there was a technical hitch. Because she’d been put in removal proceedings years before, an immigration judge needed to administratively close her old case, and, for that, ICE would have to sign off. “I was following the proper channels to make sure I was going to be O.K.,” Colotl said. “I thought this was just a formality.” ICE, however, refused to close the case, setting off two more years of court battles. In October, 2016, a Board of Immigration Appeals, from which Colotl and her lawyers sought relief, ordered the immigration judge on Colotl’s case to close the case for her removal once and for all—but the judge held off doing so.

By this March, Colotl—who has yet to visit her mother—had realized that her request for travel documents had backfired. With Donald Trump in office, ICE was no longer following the enforcement guidelines set by President Obama; the agency had fresh, and virtually unfettered, discretion to go after anyone who was undocumented. Since January, ICE has arrested forty-one thousand people, an increase of forty per cent compared with the equivalent period last year. On March 29th, the Department of Homeland Security filed a motion opposing the closure of Colotl’s past case, arguing that she had a criminal record. According to an ICE statement, Colotl “admitted guilt to a felony charge . . . of making a false statement to law enforcement in Cobb County, Ga,” which “is considered a felony conviction for immigration purposes.”

Colotl had agreed to take a plea, back in 2011, with a clear understanding: signing the deal would effectively end the state’s case against her. The language of the document left little room for doubt. “I understand that if I abide by the terms of this agreement that the charges against me will result in a dismissal,” it read, “and there will be no conviction entered against me.”

Earlier this month, Colotl and her lawyer asked a judge to intervene and reinstate her DACA status. On the phone, she took pains to sound measured about her prospects; she spoke slowly and exactingly, minding the legal distinctions and confirming that she had every date just right. Once or twice, she gently corrected me on a few details. On some of the finer points of immigration law, she has become a reluctant expert.